This story is adapted from My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route, by Sally Hayden.
In Dhar-el-Jebel, a migrant detention center deep in Libya’s Nafusa Mountains, detainees sang and recorded a song on a smartphone. The year was 2019, and deaths—from poor conditions, a lack of food, and medical neglect—had become as frequent as one every fortnight. “We have made an engagement with death,” they sang. “So pray for us before the wedding comes.”
The video topped 106,000 views on YouTube.
Most of these hundreds of refugees and migrants, locked up indefinitely, had been caught on the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe. They were part of the almost 90,000 refugees and migrants seized and forcibly returned to Libya since 2017, when the European Union began training and equipping the Libyan coast guard to intercept boats on the Central Mediterranean—the deadliest migration route in the world. Refugees end up in a network of centers—run by militias, which are infamous for the prevalence of torture, rape, and other abuses—which Pope Francis, among others, has compared to concentration camps.
In Dhar-el-Jebel, hundreds stayed in a single hall for months, with food delivered through a grate in the door and a pile of rubbish with maggots crawling through it at one end. Once, their incarceration would have meant that the detainees’ voices were silenced and what went on inside the centers might only be hinted at through statements by Libyan officials or visiting aid workers, who often are under pressure to stay silent so they can maintain access.
But throughout their ordeal there was a glimmer of light: the phones that they kept hidden and asked friends outside to top up with credit. Receiving messages from journalists and activists outside was “like a candle in the night,” one of the survivors recalled when we met in mid-2021, in Stockholm, Sweden.
The information they sent included the mounting deaths in Dhar-el-Jebel. When someone passed away, their photo would be uploaded on Facebook along with crying emojis or “RIP” written over it. Then, it would be shared hundreds or even thousands of times; sometimes, their relatives found out about what had happened through social media. Smartphones have given incarcerated refugees—even in the most isolated circumstances—a chance to get their voices and testimonies out.
Today, there are more than 26 million refugees globally, among more than 82.4 million people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes. Smartphones have drastically changed how many people go about attempting to flee or reach safety in a country far from their own. People fleeing persecution, war, and dictatorships often prioritize data over eating, and a phone over any other possession.
For refugees on dangerous journeys, a smartphone is a lifeline. I’ve met people who’ve traveled from Syria to the UK, directing themselves over land with Google maps, asking for sailing advice in Facebook groups, and staying in touch with family members (and often glossing over the reality of what they’re experiencing) through WhatsApp.
In Calais, northern France, where refugees and migrants trying to reach the UK gather to jump on trucks or trains, a Facebook group called “Phone Credit for Refugees and Displaced People” enabled Good Samaritans all over the world to donate phone credit to those living rough there. There is a reason that French police have been known to smash phones rather than target the person themselves. Destroying a smartphone destroys morale; it leaves the owner alone, without the virtual backup they need to keep going.
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It is also a fundraising tool for those turning to smugglers. Smartphones have been used to crowdfund ransoms of thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars. Desperate people who are escaping dictatorships, like that in Eritrea, or wars, like those in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Darfur in Sudan, can be convinced by smugglers to travel to Libya on a “go now, pay later” scheme, where payments are ostensibly reserved until they see results. In fact, they often end up locked in compounds somewhere in the Libyan desert when the fee they agreed to pay to reach Europe is tripled or quadrupled, and they are tortured until their families raise the money demanded.
Unable to get money through other means, the families of refugees and migrants who are being held hostage will sometimes post photos or videos on social media showing their loved one pleading to be saved or being tortured, along with details of how anyone can send money and contribute to their release. Of course, there are concerns that this raises the amount of money demanded, perhaps helping one person buy freedom but condemning another to death when they are forced to beg for even more.
A smartphone means something else, too. It’s a way to collect evidence of what you have been through, which—in at least some cases—will hopefully lead to accountability.
“Mobile phone technology has had a massive impact on rebalancing some of the power imbalances that existed before,” said Yvonne McDermott Rees, a professor of law at the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University. “In the old days, you had investigators who would fly in [to an area known for human rights abuses] and figure out what had happened.” She said smartphones meant that testimonies can be shared from places that are inaccessible to foreign investigators. They can connect with victims through WhatsApp or Skype, or look online to see what kind of accounts are coming out from a region.
Digital evidence has transformed prosecutions in both international and domestic courts, Rees added. In 2017, the first ICC arrest warrant based on social media was issued against Mahmoud Mustafa Busayf Al-Werfalli, a commander within the Al-Saiqa Brigade in Libya who was accused of involvement in 33 murders between June 2016 and July 2017. (He was killed before he could be arrested.) That same year, a 46-year-old Syrian man was sentenced to life imprisonment in Sweden for murders he had been involved in in Idlib, Syria, in 2012, with video of what happened used as key evidence.
“In theory, anyone who's got a mobile can pick it up and show the world what they're witnessing,” said McDermott Rees, but this doesn’t mean that everything is being exposed now. “There's an assumption of the democratizing potential of mobile phones as far as highlighting abuses of human rights.” But, she said, we have to also consider what else might still be missing. Phones can be good for recording police brutality, air strikes, or the military beating protesters, she said, but there are other types of violations that always happen behind closed doors, where communication is deliberately and effectively shut down.
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And even in what we might assume are accessible places, internet access is not guaranteed. Across Africa, for example, governments are increasingly using internet shutdowns to completely stop information from getting out. Over the past year, a report by VPN service company Surfshark found it was the most “censorship-intensive” region in the world: 10 African countries shut down social media, while some had full internet shutdowns at times of elections or protests.
Social media itself also has pitfalls when it comes to its evidentiary value. If you put something on Twitter or Facebook or send it by WhatsApp, the metadata can be stripped, making it easier to dispute. And social media giants have been known to remove content without considering that it may be used in war-crimes prosecutions or to build an asylum case.
Refugees have long been represented at an international level by big international non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies, particularly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. These organizations rarely hire refugees at higher levels and instead have dedicated communications staff who are tasked with producing videos and imagery that portray refugees in a way that is approved of by the agency.
A 2022 study, carried out by an academic who analyzed 706 tweets from the two largest British refugee-specific NGOs, accused these organizations of advocating for refugees in ways that “homogenize and silence their voices,” effectively leading to “double victimization.”
But refugees living in camps and countries across the world have increasingly realized that they can go online to detail their lives, while pointing out when donor-focused communications content seems to contradict their actual experiences.
Even in remote African refugee camps, where people spend decades waiting for resettlement to a Western country or for their homes to be safe to return to, the way that information is shared and distributed has shifted. “I think the power of the internet and smartphones has been a change-maker, especially for refugees who wish to get their voices to the world about the issues affecting them,” says Qaabata Boru, the former editor of Kakuma News Reflector—or KANERE—a refugee-run newspaper in Kakuma refugee camp, northwest Kenya. KANERE reporters largely use smartphones to report because they have few laptops and unreliable electricity. “Access to rights and information is important for any democratic society, including for refugees in the camps,” Boru said. “Access to smartphones has increased communication and the access to information.” Before phones were widely available there was a lot of “censorship” by international organisations, he said.
In Libya, having access to a phone with an internet connection can literally mean the difference between life and death. Refugees who attempt to cross the Mediterranean in a flimsy rubber boat will have a Thuraya satellite phone on board if their smuggler has any consideration for them. (This is not a given.) It is likely that others will have a SIM card, which is usually surrounded by plastic melted together at the edges to keep it safe from the water. If they are caught at sea and put back in detention, the SIM card stays hidden under their tongue until the person is locked up and can start to inquire whether anyone has a hidden phone they can insert it into. From there, they can contact their families to explain what has happened and potentially ask them to raise enough money so the person can get released again. As one refugee quoted in my book put it, “this SIM card is our life.”
Excerpted from My Fourth Time, We Drowned, by Sally Hayden/Published by Melville House, 2022.
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